Developing Design Systems: Patterns, Prototypes, and People

You've heard the talk about how we should be designing systems not pages, and how taking a modular, component driven approach to design is key. All true, but developing design systems is hard, messy work. Too often scalability and modularity become afterthoughts in the design proces ”evidenced as pages featuring combinations of almost, but not quite, identical components are passed on to the front end designer to sort out. But scalable, component-based design is not just a single person's responsibility. To get everyone onboard we need to bake system-thinking into the entire design process. In this talk we'll dissect what constitutes a design system, and look at different prototyping techniques that can be used to prepare, present, and bullet-proof one. We'll also tackle challenges like: how to remain creative and ideate when taking a modular approach to design, how to define and document system rules, and how to stay organized. Front-end engineer and experience designer alike, you should come away from this session with a fresh take on patterns and prototyping, along with practical examples for how they can supercharge team collaboration.

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Speaker Details

Dennis Kardys is a Chicago based user experience designer with a hang up for well crafted code. Currently the Creative Director at WSOL, he leads up a team of extremely keen designers and front end devs. When he's not busy collaborating with clients, evading meetings or squinting at markup, you're likely to find him ranting about responsive design and the mobile web, or writing about design ethics at robotregime.com.